Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s Airtime Will Fail Quickly

I discovered today that Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning have founded a new startup called Airtime which ironically is a social video service similiar to that of ChatRoulette only sans private parts and exclusive to those who have a Facebook account. But the thing that is really dubious in my opinion is their decision to use Adobe Flash to power their platform but hey maybe they didn’t get the memo that Flash is so yesterday?

I find it hard to believe though that any startup that uses flash as a core technology in their offering is going to stay afloat for long since it would prevent mobile devices from using the service which is a major necessity for the success of most tech startups that is offering a a mobile version of their product.

By the way whats up with the Sasquatch rocking out on a banjo on their website? Just kind of weird.

Completely Wrong. Sites using flash player are also able to create mobile apps that can also connect with the site. It’s called Adobe AIR for mobile.

at the end of the day, a plugin has to be used for video chat to work on the web, whether its flash or the plugin google uses, its a plugin, and flash is just more convenient as everybody has it. Even if no one had it, i’d still use it and get people to download it to use my service (like google does with its plugin).

I’m not sure if it’s really the technology, rather – is there a need to videochat (ewww) with semi random people. It actually does seem like chatroulette minus the randomness (and thus, minus the porn initially)

One: Flash is a mature platform with great tools and people are well trained on it
Two: It is a technology that has feature parity across a lot of platforms
Three: It is build into Chrome and soon IE10, which means that the mayority of webbrowsers will work with no intervention from the user.
Four: HTML5 has a long way to go in browser support and features and API’s

Lastly, as a startup, wanting to build things fast and target as many platforms as possible, flash is still the way to go, right now, with out the pain to code for 4 different browsers, supporting sortoff the same stuff in various shape of progress.